The Grandest City
by Shadsie
Summary: The Ruins of July... a wasteland. That's what people say. 23 years ago, Vash the Stampede destroyed the great city. However, after all this time, there are still those that call July home.


THE GRANDEST CITY

The Thief-of-the-Sands clutched his prize close to his body. He made fast tracks across the hot sand, beneath the two suns. A shadow moved behind him. He whipped his head around and prepared to make use of his weapons. The shadow stilled. The thief's muscles tensed. He stood perfectly still and stared toward it. It moved again, away from him. The source of the shadow showed itself from behind a broken slab of concrete. Only a wild thomas.

The thief breathed his relief, and then made for his lair. It was nestled in an outcropping of rocks and rubble. This was the city of July, after all. It had been 23 years since the city's destruction, but no one dared rebuild here - except for the Thief-of-the-Sands, and some other intrepid individuals who lived by their wits.

The thief entered his hideout. He greeted his comrades. They expressed great interest in the prize he laid before them, an antique gold watch, inlaid with diamonds. They nuzzled him with their noses and sniffed the thief, and the watch, all over. Squeaking children piled out to meet him. They twitched their wet little noses and wiggled their whiskers. The thief clicked his sharp yellow teeth – his weapons against predators, his tools for greeting his fellows.

Treasures of varied kinds lined the walls of the skitterrat burrow – jewelry, metal eating utensils, bullet-shells, shining foil candy wrappers. The thief belonged to a large colony, which had made their tunnels beneath the rubble of what was once a bank building. July had been the skitterats' home for many generations. They inherited this portion of the city after it was broken and the humans were gone.

This was their heritage. Their ancestors had lived here before the humans had built their city, before they had even come to the land. The skitterats were natives here – part mammal, part reptile. Scales lined their cheeks beneath their fur. Their feet were like the claws of lizards. The tunnels beneath the clay of July were their cities – which they were free to build again beneath the wreck and ruin of what once belonged to Mankind.

Beneath the double suns, the city of July was a bustling metropolis. Skitterrats skittered to and fro. Small, toothed, dinosaur-like birds flew in between the broken shells of houses and apartments. A mother greenquail settled on her nest of eggs, built in a sheltered cup in the spiral of a twisted iron beam.

Feral cats hunted between chunks of adobe and broken stones and bricks. A herd of thomas snuffled the sands, searching for seedlings and lichens. They flared the feathers on their necks to let the wind hit and cool their skin. They moaned as they walked, ponderous, unafraid of predators. Men did not live here anymore. Though a ruin, the former city of July still sat upon bedrock. Sandworms could not venture here, and stayed far out in the sands. They sometimes leapt and dove in the sands on the very outskirts of July's rubble-scatter, frustrated at the thomas herds that took refuge in the city center.

The seedling of a thorny tree thrived in the shade of a child's toy truck, its dumper attachment keeping a wind-tossed hill of sand at bay, sheltering the young plant. Shining black beetles crawled from one shady area to another, gathering seeds blown against chunks of metal and concrete.

A black feral cat dug her claws into the worn fabric of an ancient easy chair. Two tiny kittens, as dark as a moonless night, climbed out of a hole in the cushion-less seat and tumbled down into the sand, mewling, swatting at one another, wresting with each other.

A large, lone feral dog jumped and danced around a dry, long bone. He picked it up in his mouth and tossed it into the air. He played "fetch" entirely by himself, yipping and ruffing happily. He dug his paws into the earth, his front paws, then his back paws, clawing up clay, staking his territory in what was once July Cemetery.

A thomas, the bull of the herd, uttered a low moan and trotted toward a large, white-speckled female. He strutted and spread his little flightless wings. He grunted, snorted, and started preening the female's feathers. She sat down in the sand and he mounted her. The rest of the thomas turned and watched the quick mating among scattering sand and flying feathers. Satisfied, the bull trotted off toward the broken gravestones of the cemetery, where the dog played. The female shook sand off herself and resumed snuffling the ground for food.

People around the world said that July was a ruin. They called it "Lost July" and said that it was a waste. They said that there was no life there. Very few people visited the ruins. Even fewer ever looked at those ruins closely. July was still a city, just no longer a city of man.

Shadsie, 2005

Author Notes: I grew up watching things like "Nature" and "Wild America." I also grew up in a rural area, in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona – and have seen many forms of life take up shelter in buildings long abandoned by people. I have an undying fascination with the natural world.

"Skitterats" and "greenquail" are animals that I made up. Sandworms and Thomas, of course, are (Copyright) to Yasuhiro Nightow, creator of Trigun. Cats and dogs, well... they are (Copyright) to God.

I wrote this for a challenge on the LiveJournal community "trigun shots" (A low-sitting hyphen between the name. formatting sucks. I'm on LiveJournal under the name "lushdesolation"), the challenge being "July Revisited." I wanted to do something different than what others were writing for the challenge. If this story came across as a Discovery Channel special – good, that's what I was going for, though hopefully not in a terribly boring way. Thanks for reading. Leave a note.


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